The present invention relates to an electrical form design and management apparatus for conducting design and management of electrical forms.
Conventionally, the PDF (Portable Document Format) has been opened to the public as a format of forms. As a format of forms available on the web in recent years, however, XForms is attracting notice. This is a format of the next generation web form which is being established by WWWC (World Wide Web Consortium). Its candidate recommendation was opened to the public on Nov. 12, 2002 (see, for example, [0238] of US2003/0061201A1) where XForms has also been introduced ([0238] and [0250]).
This aims at using one piece of contents in a plurality of devices, such as personal computers and cell phones, by separating presentation and contents in the XHTML form.
Here, presentation prescribes a presentation method on presentation of the browser or the like. For example, the presentation prescribes an alternative component, such as a text area or a drop-down list. Whether an alternative component is presented by a drop-down list or presented by a radio button depends upon the device or the related language. However, it is also a feature of XForms to prescribe the presentation method with an abstract level that does not depend on the device.
Contents are broadly classified into instance data, model and constraint. The instance data is data input to the form. For example, data input to the text area of the presentation described earlier is stored. In the model, the member and data type of the input data are prescribed. In the constraint, an upper limit value and a lower limit value of data for each member of the model, or whether the member should be permitted to input data is included.
When conducting development and maintenance on several thousands to several tens thousands electrical forms in the conventional technique, conducting development and maintenance on individual electrical forms poses a problem that update oversights occur simultaneously with increased labor and a worsened efficiency.
Furthermore, in the XForms, it has been proposed to define a form by dividing it into presentation and contents. However, a method of efficiently advancing the design/maintenance of forms, such as updating a plurality of forms collectively by using this structure, is not mentioned.